Attitude control for a micromechanical flying insect via sensor output feedback

Abstract

Body rotation and orientation sensing mechanisms used by flying insects are introduced and their mathematical models are presented. The analysis and simulations of these models showed the feasibility of using such biologically inspired approaches to build biomimetic gyroscopes and angular position detectors. Further, an approximate rigid body model for the insect body dynamics is developed so that attitude stabilization techniques for a flying robotic insect can be tested to illustrate the utility of these novel sensor architectures. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first attempt in using output feedback from biomimetic devices such as ocelli and halters to achieve attitude stabilization.